Comments on: Librarians Need to Stop Going to Library Conferences

By: Connie Schardt

Connie Schardt — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Just reading this now. Going to our customer conferences can be a real eye-opener. I attended the SGIM conference back in 2004. I was with my Duke faculty and we were doing a workshop on PDAs. (It was everyone’s ticket to the meeting!) While there, I also attended a PubMed workshop by clinicians – and was amazed at the misinformation and it was standing room only! There is an opportunity here for us to conduct workshops at their meetings.

By: Matthew 2.0

Matthew 2.0 — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:53:06 +0000

Marlene: I remember being at an AHA (Hospital) meeting about 20 years ago and I was shocked at the size of the Exhibit area. I remember thinking it would be a great place to have a booth

Absolutely. When first reading this post and the comments, I was thinking about how impractical attending a professional conference outside of your profession for the most part would be. How much would a doctor really get out of attending a health librarian conference? But librarianship should have a presence at patron conferences in the form of our associations. In a way, we are vendors for them, albeit usually those that don’t charge anything, and so we need to “sell” our services in general.

By: Julia Shaw-Kokot

Julia Shaw-Kokot — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:12:33 +0000

As library liaison and adjunct faculty for our School of Nursing, I agree that we learn much by getting out of the library and attending non-library conferences. When I have done that, I’ve come back with many new ideas. However, I believe you can start closer to home. There are regular lectures, CE events, local and regional conferences in all the disciplines. I’ve attended many, and sometimes have a faculty member mention they are pleased to know I am interested in a given topic. Attending these activities, and working closely with faculty or staff on planning committees or presentations, gets you viability and invitations to speak. These closer to home activities also fit into our almost nonexistent travel budget.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:58:38 +0000

Michelle, that’s a good point about advocacy such as for hospital libraries/librarians – I hadn’t been thinking of that one yesterday. I do like the notion of bringing ideas back and being more visible generally. How often do librarians get on the CE programs of other conferences? Would there be interest at other conferences in something like getting the most out of databases like the NLM tools, finding data, etc. – workshops on finding information more efficiently?

By: stevenb

stevenb — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:08:13 +0000

I can agree with the philosophy of the post – librarians have to get beyond the boundaries of their own professional literature and conferences if they want to be more knowledgeable and innovative. That’s a philosophy I’ve promoted for quite some time with the Keeping Up Web Site. It’s more focused on non-library resources than library content. We have librarians here that do attend the conferences of their disciplinary specialties and I think that’s not a new thing in academic librarianship. I would argue that to really understand your users it might not be necessary to go to disciplinary conferences. That’s a great way to immerse yourself in the discipline and current trends and issues. But there’s no saying the people you meet at the conference will accurately reflect your users. There’s probably greater advantage to making an effort to study your local users – and those who want to get better at doing that should pay more attention to the literature and practice of user experience. The real issue is that many librarians either have lost funding for conference attendance or can only attend one major conference. Those that need to present for tenure can’t do that at a disciplinary conference in most cases – so they may have no choice but to go to a library conference. If we have unlimited funds, I’d encourage academic librarians to not only go to disciplinary conferences – but higher education and teaching/learning conferences. As educators we can learn much more about improving our skills in those areas than we can at disciplinary conferences.

By: Jane Watson-Brown

Jane Watson-Brown — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:57:47 +0000

Thinking about incident 1 & 2 above, hasn’t this response always been the case? With over 25 years in the profession, I have always found that others tend to believe our profession is only about shelving and stamping books. Being a librarian has always been about management of collections (in whatever format they exist) and making those collections accessible to the clients. I think there is a common misconception out there that librarians are somehow made obselete by technology rather than being early adopters of it. There has been no moment of my career I have not used computer & telcommunications-based technology to deliver services. I cannot think of one form of digital technology librarians have not used early (and often) to enhance service and collection access.
I was chatting to an academic recently who said she couldn’t imagine there would be any work in university libraries, because few of her colleagues actually go to the library. The fact that librarians create such easy access to electronic information on campus through combining a sophisticated mix of buying, negotiation, planning, creative software use and navigation design skills is invisible to her. That’s probably as it should be, but seamless access and invisibility should not always go hand-in-hand.
The conversation between client & librarian should be never ending. If attending (or perhaps actually presenting papers at) conferences is a way of enhancing the conversation, then by all means do it. But the engagement of librarians with clients must be a constant – and the difficult trick is turning the client from passive recipient to active user.

By: Marlene

Marlene — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:44:31 +0000

I remember being at an AHA (Hospital) meeting about 20 years ago and I was shocked at the size of the Exhibit area. I remember thinking it would be a great place to have a booth. Maybe there were librarians there – I don’t recall seeing any. But, I think it’s a great place to have a presence. Administrators aren’t always the ones who use our services (I know – there are many exceptions out there and many librarians who have great, supportive administrators). But, they control the purse strings and if they don’t know what we do, much of the rest won’t matter. But, having been in the profession for 35 years (Yikes!) I can definitely say “deja vu.” I remember many “campaigns by the Hospital Libraries Section of MLA, in the 80s and 90s, to try to reach out to hospital administrators. And, for my own rant, I’d like to go to a book publisher convention and scream at them for putting copyrights on books that are years in the future. I couldn’t believe we received a book with a 2011 copyright date in 2009.

By: Alison

Alison — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:13:17 +0000

That’s an excellent point, Rachel. It’s very difficult to advocate for medical librarianship in any kind of general way. So much depends on the skills and interests of the individual librarian, and those vary widely. We’re dependent on medical librarians to step up and advocate for themselves.

NLM does have a presence at many national healthcare and health administration meetings, but I’m not convinced that a presence limited to the exhibit hall is all that effective. I always have a better idea of how librarians can “fit” when I’m able to attend sessions and hear for myself what’s on peoples’ minds.

The Sewell Memorial Fund has been sending librarians to national public health and pharmacy conferences for several years now. I highly recommend applying for a stipend:
http://www.sewellfund.org/Stipends.htm

If you’re at all interested in public health, you should definitely try to attend APHA or a state/regional meeting. You’ll be amazed at the energy and ideas.

By: Lori Reed

Lori Reed — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:11:45 +0000

These are really interesting points. I work in a public library and am active in the ASTD and ISPI chapters here. I’ve heard the same comments about Google replacing librarians, etc. I take that as an opportunity to educate people about what it is we do. I’ve also presented at their meetings about what we do and what we have to offer them. It’s really helped. I see more of these same people in the library now. I think on we really need a worldwide campaign to rebrand and remarket libraries of the 21st century–public, academic, etc. We’re so much more than buns and books

By: KraftyLibrarian

KraftyLibrarian — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:08:38 +0000

Sarah, great ideas on how going to a user’s conference can also help with your own library development and generate ideas to better market your services.
I don’t think we should give up our own conferences and meeting but your examples show how diversifying can be just as helpful.